Juno Rylee Schultz“Watch Everything That Moves Inside the Ghetto”
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Words, research, and edits: Juno Rylee Schultz (she/her)
Research and edits: Kylie Tuinier (she/her)
Edits: Bex Stump (she/her) and Nathan Thatcher-Miller (he/him)
“When you look at the social movements from the point of view of the FBI, it looks very different. You know J. Edgar Hoover is famous for saying that he feared the rise of a Black Messiah”
Donna Murch, professor and author
“Black America was always a particular focus of the FBI, because there was the presumption that Black people are somehow more susceptible to recruitment for a dangerous ideology.”
David Garrow, author and historian
“I think for Hoover, particularly in his early years, communists were in some sense, the ultimate subversives. He saw them as disruptive of a kind of law and order, of a certain kind of social order. He saw them as disruptive on questions of race.”
– Beverly Gage, author and historian
“I believe in power,” President Theodore Roosevelt wrote in June 1908 while constructing ideas for what would become the Federal Bureau of Investigation. America was expanding in population rapidly from immigration in the early 1900s, and Roosevelt wanted to protect the White House’s vision of America from the possibilities from ideas from the outside world.
Anarchists had already been banned from living in America since 1903, and secret data was already being gathered by the Justice Department and the Labor Department on foreigners considered to have radical beliefs.
The Justice Department was established in 1870 to address the aftermath left from the Civil War, but outside of Congress providing “the authority to detect and prosecute crimes against the United States,” there wasn’t a framework for how the department was ultimately meant to function and hold enemies of America accountable.
The four presidents before Roosevelt had used the services of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency for the purposes of “law enforcement, a source of secret intelligence, and a tool for political combat,” including for Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War. Allan Pinkerton’s detective agency helped with a wide range of services for the federal government, including assisting with the creation of the Secret Service, as well as “cracking skulls to defeat labor organizers.”
The Pinkertons were never shy about the use of violence and lawlessness in order to enforce the law, which culminated in Congress banning “the government from hiring the firm” in 1892, after workers were killed during “a confrontation at the Carnegie Steel Company.”
This left the task of filling the void in intelligence gathering, and law enforcement on a federal level, up to the government.
Tim Weiner writes in Enemies: A History of the FBI, that “after the McKinley assassination, a Pinkerton man proposed creating a new government agency dedicated to eradicating America’s radicals.”
“These people should all be marked and kept under constant surveillance,” Robert A. Pinkerton wrote.
Roosevelt contacted Attorney General Charles J. Bonaparte, and asked “that he obtain the necessary investigative personnel” to investigate land frauds, as well as other federal matters.
Bonaparte and Roosevelt both considered themselves to be liberals, progressives, and supporters of intellectual pursuits, but they both also “supported the judicious use of force in the name of the law.”
In Enemies: A History of the FBI, it is written that “Roosevelt favored giving strikers a taste of the nightstick [and] Bonaparte believed … violence by vigilantes could serve to vindicate the social order.”
Bonaparte worked to create an investigative agency inside the Department of Justice, “which would report to no one except the Attorney General.”
It would be known as the Bureau of Investigation, the precursor to the FBI.
Bonaparte still had to ask congress to create this new bureau. He formally requested the money and authority to create “a small, carefully selected, and experienced force” from Roosevelt’s request.
On May 27, 1908, the House said no, believing “the president intended to create an American secret police.”
Politicians from both parties believed a central police or spy network could and would be abused, even if it wasn’t the intention.
Congress banned the Justice Department from spending any money on Bonaparte’s request from Roosevelt, but Bonaparte simply ignored the ruling. It was in clear violation of what was approved, but as Tim Weiner writes in Enemies: “Theodore Roosevelt was “ready to kick the Constitution into the back yard whenever it gets in the way,” as Mark Twain observed. The beginnings of the FBI rose from that bold defiance.”
On July 26, 1908, Bonaparte signed into law an “investigative division with a thirty-four-man force of “special agents.”
He had no money to carry out the president’s wishes, but it was a start.
Congress learned about the creation of the Bureau of Investigation when it was already said and done, in December 1908, inside Bonaparte’s annual report on the happenings at the Justice Department, writing that “it became necessary for the department to organize a small force of special agents of its own.”
Bonaparte “personally swore to Congress that the Bureau would not be a secret police [and] would be above politics.”
He elaborated further by saying “the Attorney General knows or ought to know at all times what they are doing,” but as Tim Weiner points out in Enemies, “the precipice between ‘knows’ and ‘ought to know’ would become a dangerous abyss when J. Edgar Hoover came to power.”
Hoover became the chief of the Justice Department’s newly created Radical Division on August 1, 1919, leading “hundreds of agents and informants working for the Bureau of Investigation” in a “nationwide campaign against the enemies of the states.”
The Bureau of Investigation began “its first nationwide domestic surveillance programs under the Espionage Act of 1917.”
The Espionage Act made possession of information that was even considered to be able to harm Americans an offense that was punishable by death. Anyone who shared information or ideas that were considered “disloyal” could be subject to imprisonment. Over a thousand people were convicted under the Espionage Act, all of them regular people who just disagreed with the war.
The search for spies and saboteurs mostly led to departments all over the government stepping on each other’s toes while chasing rumors and dead ends. There were too many people looking for nothing.
As Tim Weiner writes in Enemies: “The search became a free-for-all. Attorney General Gregory and the Bureau of Investigation’s wartime director, A. Bruce Bielaski, backed business executives across the country who financed the ultrapatriotic American Protective League–gangs of citizens who spied on suspected subversives. They worked in posses, wearing badges proclaiming them members of a “secret service.” At its height the league claimed more than 300,000 loyalists. Its more zealous members reveled in burglarizing and beating their fellow Americans in the name of justice and the flag. The rumors, gossip, and innuendo gathered by the league filled the files of the Bureau of Investigation.”
Treasury Secretary William G. McAdoo informed the president that the Bureau of Investigation being associated with the American Protective League posed “the gravest danger of misunderstanding, confusion, and even fraud.”
Wilson told the Attorney General he wasn’t sure what to do for “the best remedy” for the “disorder in the government’s ranks” but agreed there was a problem.
The Attorney General’s response was to use the Bureau of Investigation as more of “a political strike force” and to begin raids on left-wing labor unions. Doors were kicked down in dozens of American cities, and over 150 union leaders were convicted across “three mass trials.”
Tim Weiner writes in ENEMIES that “President Wilson heartily approved” of the arrests, with major newspapers suggesting “that the Germans [must have] paid the IWW to subvert American industries.”
During the end of World War I, the American government was led to believe there were connections between the Germans and Bolshevik Russian revolutionaries. The American people began to feel the same way, after the propaganda that had tricked President Wilson was published with Wilson’s approval. This further escalated paranoia against the threat and fear of communism.
By January 1919, the Senate was holding hearings to discuss the looming Communist threat. The Justice Department provided Senator Overman with full access to the Bureau’s records for the hearings. In exchange,the investigating committee gave the Bureau copies of everything collected from other branches of government.
As paranoia over the Red threat grew within Congress, strikes across the country began to take place, adding to the government’s belief that the Soviets were connected to the conflict between labor and capital.
On January 21, 1919, 35,000 shipyard workers in Seattle began to strike, until “Federal troops put down their uprising.” However it was too late; telephone operators, coal miners, textile workers, and even a Boston police force joined the strike across the country.
On August 1, 1919, the Attorney General attached J. Edgar Hoover to the task of crushing “the Communist conspiracy” that was believed to be plaguing the nation.
Hoover held authority over nearly a hundred agents, and began building files and cases against “tens of thousands” of suspected subversives. He was assisted in his task by “immigration and passport services, postmasters, police commissioners, private detectives, and political vigilantes.”
It was easy to earn a spot on Hoover’s list of suspects. Even just attending a political rally by a group seen as opposition, and being seen by an informant, or simply being a reader of “any of the 222 radical foreign-language newspapers” available in America.
Hoover held files on over 50,000 people within three months of assuming his position.
According to ENEMIES: “the Bureau compiled … dossiers on the places where these people gathered, the publications they read, and the political groups they joined. Every one of these people had to be weighed as a potential threat to national security. Each might have a role in a secret underground, each might be a camouflaged soldier in what Hoover came to call “the mad march of Red fascism.”
By September 8, 1919, Hoover had learned of reports coming from Chicago, detailing speeches and pamphlets critical of law enforcement, while also “calling for nationwide strikes, a workers’ revolution, and the creation of a Soviet America.”
Hoover’s conclusion was that Communists in Chicago were “controlled by the Communist International in Moscow.” He sent a report to Washington claiming the groups in Chicago had a goal “to overthrow the Government of the United States by force and violence.”
On October 17, 1919, the Senate passed a resolution asking what had been done for the Communist threat, demanding to know why the crisis continued without Hoover, Palmer, and the Bureau stopping it.
On October 30, Hoover prepared agents for the planned mass arrest of “members of the Union of Russian Workers.”
Hoover wrote to the immigration chief asking for “cooperation of the immigration inspectors” at the time of the raids, and was given approval. The raids were scheduled for November 7, 1919, with Hoover’s men and New York Police storming the Union of Russian Workers headquarters.
Everyone was forcibly removed from the building and beaten. The rooms were reportedly ransacked so heavily that “the rooms looked like they had been dynamited.”
New York police served dozens of search warrants and “arrested every card-carrying Communist they could find.”
The raids took place across dozens of major cities all across the country, all while Hoover sent photos and press releases claiming victory to newspapers.
Over a thousand suspects were arrested “across eight states,” though only about 200 would actually be found “worthy of deportation under the law.”
Hoover prepared the Bureau for his “far bigger crackdown” set to take place in the coming weeks. He stressed the danger and importance of the threat across government channels saying that “[The Communists] would destroy the peace of the country and thrust it into a condition of anarchy and lawlessness and immorality that passes imagination.”
On November 18, Hoover ordered all of the Bureau’s field agents to work on procuring affidavits for anyone in the country who could be considered “prominent in Communist activities.”
This was to legally deport the accused and collected individuals under the Anarchist Exclusion Act.
These messages were marked “personal and confidential,” bearing Hoover’s initials: JEH.
The assignment was a massive undertaking, and enough to fill up the Buford, a retired American warship, which would be used to deport the accused anarchists all the way to Soviet Russia.
On December 20, Hoover traveled to Ellis Island–a symbol often associated with immigration, hope, and freedom for so many–with congressmen and a swath of reporters. It was frigid with snow blowing around the ad-hoc prison island. At the stroke of midnight, 249 prisoners were brought out to the ship.
Hoover did not need to be there, but very much wanted to be, not just to bask in his victory, or the photo opportunities, but so he could argue and “spar” with the prisoners before they boarded the Buford.
“It was 4:20 A.M. on the day of our Lord, December 21, 1919. I felt dizzy, visioning a transport of politicals doomed to Siberia … Russia of the past rose before me … But no, it was New York, it was America, the land of liberty! Through the port-hole I could see the great city receding into the distance, its sky-line of buildings traceable by their rearing heads. It was my beloved city, the metropolis of the New World. It was America, indeed America repeating the terrible scenes of tsarist Russia! I glanced up–the Statue of Liberty!”
Emma Goldman, activist and author, and the last to board the Buford, writing about the experience years later
Hoover went back to work the next day, eager to continue the plans he had set into motion.
On the afternoon of December 30, 1919, the chief of the Communist Party of America, Charles E. Ruthenberg, went to lunch in New York with seven of his closest comrades. One of them was an undercover spy whose reports went to the Justice Department marked “Attention–Mr. Hoover.”
On December 31, 1919, Hoover and the Bureau went after over 2,000 Communists, gathered by the Bureau over a period of “six weeks.”
By that evening, Hoover had obtained about 3,000 warrants, all with a special status that denied “the arrested suspects the right to see a lawyer.”
By January, federal detention centers and jails across the country were packed. Ellis Island was “overflowing” with detained prisoners.
Newspapers were informed that the raids were conducted under the authority of the Attorney General, with the importance of saving America from the growing and ever-present Communist threat.
Hoover was convinced “that the Communists might organize secret cells in Mexico, stockpile arms from Germany and Japan, cross the border, and plant the seeds of revolution among black men in the American South.”
In 1921, Hoover continued growing his list of allies against the Communist threat, all while warning other agencies “in weekly bulletins” that the Reds were burrowing into communities across America.
Tim Weiner articulates Hoover’s true feelings in ENEMIES, writing: “Hoover would write, later in his life, that the Communist Party’s influence on American life was “virtually nonexistent” in the early 1920s. That was not what he said at the time.
By Spring 1923, Daugherty and Burns were engaging in political espionage against senators “whom the attorney general saw as threats to America.”
Agents were going through mail, tapping phones, and breaking into homes under the belief that “the political movement in the Senate toward American diplomatic recognition of Soviet Russia.”
Justifiable rage erupted after Senator Wheeler and other senators announced they had been victims of politically motivated espionage at the hands of the Bureau.
A few weeks later, the Senate resolved to investigate the Department of Justice, as well as the Bureau of Investigation.
John H. W. Crim, the chief of the Criminal Division, was a cooperative witness since he was about to retire after nearly 20 years at the Justice Department.
Crim told the Senate point-blank: “Get rid of this Bureau of Investigation.”
Attorney General Daugherty would eventually be indicted for fraud, but skipped jail time after two deadlocked juries couldn’t come to agreement. He only escaped conviction due to the Fifth Amendment protecting individuals from self-incrimination.
On April 8, 1924 Harlan Fiske Stone was chosen as the new Attorney General by President Coolidge, in part from how critical Stone was of the 1920 raids, including his urging to investigate the charges against those being deported and charged.
Stone spent the next several weeks bumping into people all across the Justice Department, taking notes, and asking as many questions as he so desired.
It was his job to ensure the Justice Department and the Bureau of Investigation didn’t continue its streak of lawlessness and corruption.
Stone remarked in his notes on how the Justice Department was “in exceedingly bad odor [and] filled with men with bad records … agents engaged in many practices which are brutal and tyrannical in the extreme.”
Attorney General Harlan Stone fired William J. Burns from his position as the director of the Bureau of Investigation, issuing a scorching public statement and judgment on the path he felt the Justice Department had been taking.
“A secret police system may become a menace to free government and free institutions because it carries with it the possibility of abuses of power which are not always quickly comprehended or understood. The enormous expansion of Federal legislation, both civil and criminal, has made the Bureau of Investigation a necessary instrument of law enforcement. But it is important that its activities be strictly limited to the performance of those functions for which it was created and that its agents themselves be not above the law or beyond its reach.
The Bureau of Investigation is not concerned with political or other opinions of individuals. It is only concerned with their conduct and then only with such conduct as is forbidden by the laws of the United States. When a police system passes beyond these limits, it is dangerous to the proper administration of justice and to human liberty, which should be our first concern to cherish. Within them it should rightly be a terror to the wrongdoer.”
The following month, Stone called Hoover to tell him that he was “on trial.”
Stone was putting Hoover in the role of acting director of the Bureau of Investigation, but “on an interim basis.”
Stone would be keeping a close eye on Hoover, who would “report directly to Stone. Going forward, Hoover was ordered to only investigate violations of federal law.
Hoover agreed with the terms, and Stone let everyone in the government know that he was in charge–and that Hoover was on thin ice.
On August 7, 1924, Hoover, Roger Baldwin (head of the ACLU), and Stone sat down for a talk at the Justice Department.
Hoover assured his boss, as well as the ACLU head, “that the days of political espionage were over.”
Hoover reminded the other men that the General Intelligence Division had ceased operations, just as Stone had ordered.
Hoover played his cards so well that Baldwin told reporters that he believed Hoover was perfect for the job.
Hoover sent “a gracious thank-you note,” with the words that “it is my goal to leave my desk each day with the knowledge that I have in no way violated the rights of the citizens of this country.”
The FBI never stopped spying on the ACLU though, with the Bureau keeping “a spy on the ACLU’s executive board,” as well as donor lists, and even the ACLU’s legal strategies and plans.
“We never knew about the way that Hoover’s FBI kept track of us. They never stopped watching us.”
Roger Baldwin, speaking about the FBI’s activities against the ACLU, fifty years later
Hoover actually didn’t change anything … the same tactics just went further into the shadows. The files and objectives remained the same, but went into deeper and further hidden places, instead of in transparent places.
To keep everything under the cover of darkness, Hoover created a new filing system called “Official and Confidential,” which were all “kept under his control.”
As Tim Weiner points out in ENEMIES: “In theory, the Bureau’s centralized records belonged to the Justice Department,” and so they were subject to discovery in the courts or via Congress subpoena. But the files remained hidden in plain view, “for fifty years [Hoover’s] inviolate cache of secrets.”
That all being said, Stone was none the wiser, and so on December 10, 1924, Stone let Hoover know he had passed the test.
Hoover was now the director of the Bureau of Investigation.
President Roosevelt gave his first orders to Hoover on May 8, 1934, saying he wanted “a very careful and searching investigation” of American fascism.
Hoover moved trepidatiously into the field of fighting fascism, lacking the passion and excitement he always held for Communist raids.
Still, Hoover did give orders to all his field offices, requesting “so-called intelligence investigations” into Nazis and fascists operating in America.
For two years, Hoover’s Bureau took notes on groups such as the German-American Bund, the Silver Shirts, Liberty Lobby, and Father Charles Coughlin. Little was done outside of monitoring and data collection. Hoover did his best to wrestle Roosevelt’s focus back onto fighting communism.
FDR and Hoover held a meeting on August 24, 1936, in secret at the White House. According to ENEMIES, “Roosevelt routinely refused to keep written accounts of crucial meetings, especially on matters of secret intelligence.”
The only account that exists for this meeting is from Hoover’s own personal notes.
Roosevelt spoke to Hoover about his desire for “a broad picture” of the influence that “subversive activities in the United States” had given to the state of “the politics and economics of the nation.”
According to Hoover’s notes, he warned the president that the communist influence was the threat to be concerned with, even insisting “that Communists were boring into the government itself through the National Labor Relations Board.”
“I told him that the communists planned to get control of these three groups and by doing so they would be able to paralyze the country … stop all shipping … stop the operation of industry … and stop publication of any newspapers.”
Hoover’s notes on the meeting with Roosevelt
Hoover told Roosevelt the FBI needed more authority for secret intelligence operations, citing the 1916 statute where the FBI was originally provided with intelligence power.
FDR called for a meeting with Secretary of State Cordell Hull, Hoover, and himself, on August 25, 1936.
According to ENEMIES: “Nothing in writing came from the president or the state department. Hoover did not record the precise language of the conversation. The legend at the FBI is that Hull turned to Hoover and said: “Go ahead and investigate the cock-suckers.”
Hoover got to work with his renewed powers immediately, telling all FBI offices: “Obtain from all possible sources information concerning subversive activities being conducted in the United States by Communists, Fascisti, and representatives … of other organizations … advocating the overthrow or replacement of the Government of the United States by illegal methods.”
Hoover and the FBI started investigating “left-wing labor leaders in the coal, shipping, steel, newspaper, and garment industries,” as well as within “schools, universities, the federal government, and in the armed forces.”
FDR and Hoover continued to enjoy each other’s trust, with Hoover pleased with how much power Roosevelt had given him. Their shared goals kept them both motivated, as well as Roosevelt becoming excited whenever intelligence would pay off.
On September 6, 1939, days after war had erupted across Europe, FDR informed the American people that the FBI would “take charge of investigative work in matters relating to espionage.”
He then ordered every law enforcement officer in the United States to give the FBI “any information obtained by them relating to espionage, counter-espionage, sabotage, subversive activities and violations of the neutrality law.”
On December 6, 1939, Hoover sent out a memo to every FBI agent, ordering them “to prepare a list of people who should be locked up in the name of national security.”
These were the enemies of the State–or the potential enemies of the State–and it was known as the Custodial Detention Program.
According to ENEMIES, the list contained two categories: “The first were to be arrested and interned immediately upon the outbreak of hostilities between the United States and the nation to which they were loyal. The second were to be “watched carefully” when war came, based on “the possibility but not the probability that they will act in a manner adverse to the best interests of the Government of the United States.”
Hoover told agents to keep all interviews and inquiries secret.
With Roosevelt’s help and intervention, Hoover was also now able to wiretap at will. It still remained illegal, but the FBI and Justice Department could get away with it, in the name of national security, thanks to FDR.
According to ENEMIES, “[Across the next twenty five years], the FBI installed at least 6,679 warrantless wiretaps and 1,806 bugs in the name of national security.”
The author of ENEMIES also astutely points out that “these figures are almost surely understated, since some taps, bugs, and break-ins went unreported in order to protect the secrecy of the operations…”
For the next five years, Hoover supplied FDR with ample intelligence on his political enemies, as well as labeled subversives living within the country.
FDR sent Hoover a thank-you card on June 14, 1940, remarking “for the many interesting and valuable reports that you have made to me regarding the last few months.”
Hoover reminded the White House of his dedication, three months later, by reporting he was spying on “all telephone conversations into and out of the following embassies: German, Italian, French, Russian, and Japanese.”
Hoover truly had begun to embody more than just the role of the director of the FBI, becoming FDR’s personal intelligence operation.
When Pearl Harbor was attacked on Sunday, December 7, 1941, Hoover was already prepared as FBI agents had been collecting data on the operations and whereabouts of subversive suspects in America for the last few months.
The attorney general, Francis Biddle, signed orders for the detention of 3,846 German, Italian, and Japanese people living in America.
The FBI started capturing those who they had labeled the most dangerous before the agency even had the warrants.
Within a year and half of the Pearl Harbor attack, the FBI had arrested over 15,000 people suspected of being subversives. About 10,000 people were released though, after “the civilian panels deemed they were not a clear and present danger to the United States.”
This reversal in arrests led Attorney General Biddle to learn of Hoover keeping lists on Americans “deemed deserving of military internment.”
On July 6, 1943, the attorney general informed the director that he “thought the secret files were themselves a danger to the United States.”
Biddle further elaborated in an order abolishing the program: “The job of the FBI was investigating the activities of persons who have violated the law. It is not aided in this work by classifying persons as to dangerousness…”
Hoover ignored the order from the Attorney General, continuing everything he had been doing, but further obfuscated under a new name and more layers of secrecy.
The list had its name changed to the Security Index.
According to ENEMIES: “the decision stayed secret until after [Hoover’s] death.”
Anyone “opposed to the American way of life” made the cut to earn a place on Hoover’s Security Index.
On August 14, 1943, Hoover ordered the FBI to increase their efforts to add suspects to the Security Index. He also reminded the agency to continue to keep it a secret, reiterating it was to be shared only with trusted military intelligence officers “on a strictly confidential basis.”
In November 1946, the Republicans won majorities in the Senate and the House, largely boosted from their campaigns containing an increased “anti-Communist tone.”
Republicans boosted their message with the help of a “forty-page pamphlet published by the United States Chamber of Commerce, which printed and distributed 400,000 copies nationwide.”
The author was a priest named Father John F. Cronin, who had many acquaintances within the FBI, which is where much of the pamphlet’s contents had come from.
On March 26, 1947, the House Committee on Un-American Activities heard public testimony from Hoover, where he told Congress the Communist Party was working hard on its mission to overthrow the country. Hoover also shared how he believed the Truman administration hadn’t been treating the threat with the right amount of attention.
Hoover stated the Communist Party might look small in the face of American politics but that “for every member, there are ten others ready to do the party’s work.”
Hoover painted liberals and democrats as people who were tricked and fell for the communist rhetoric, suggesting that the poison of communist ideals had even infected much of the government, and the Democratic party.
Hoover and the FBI had teamed up ideologically with the Committee on the Un-American Activities, vowing to work toward ending the threat together.
On September 23, 1950, Congress passed the Internal Security Act of 1950, giving “legal sanction” to Hoover’s Security Index. The laws laying out espionage were more defined to the FBI’s favor as well.
Less than a year later, in June 1951, Hoover began working to enforce and spread the FBI’s Sex Deviates Program.
The goal was to push homosexuals away from all public jobs with power or influence, including government, police, and education.
According to ENEMIES: “The FBI’s files on American homosexuals grew to 300,000 pages over the next twenty-five years before they were destroyed.”
The Responsibilities Program was started in secret during that same summer. For the next four years, the program was used to cleanse the staff of universities, colleges, and schools of hundreds of suspected subversives, homosexuals, and leftists, until its secrecy was breached by a publicity-hunting state education commissioner. Years later, it’s impossible to quantify how many lives were tragically impacted from these hateful measures.
Hoover believed the national security of the United States–and likely his power and freedoms in his office–were contingent on a Republican victory. And so, Hoover worked to ensure that Eisenhower and Nixon would have as much of an advantage as Hoover and his FBI could offer.
Democrat nominee Governor Adlai Stevenson of Illinois fell victim to the Sex Deviates files, with it leaking he was a homosexual, in a “nineteen-page memo” filled with “vicious gossip.”
It included a report from a New York police officer and detective who said “the governor not only was one of the best-known homosexuals in the state of Illinois but used the drag name “Adeline.”
Hoover made sure that this politically-motivated, tabloid gossip made its way to Richard Nixon and “and a large number of journalists.”
Hoover was told “that he would have the complete support of the White House in the years to come.”
Hoover and his FBI enjoyed a good relationship with Eisenhower and Nixon with “a direct telephone line [running] from the White House to Hoover’s home.”
Eisenhower reportedly only called here and there, but “Nixon called twice a day, early in the morning and late at night.”
The men worked closely together in investigating and working to purge communist, homosexual, and other suspected subversives from government positions, which included a high level of scrutiny and interviews to cross-examine everyone. Paranoia was at an all-time high and always climbing.
On May 18, 1956, one of Hoover’s most well-known instruments and weapons was born. It came out of the ashes of the Supreme Court “allowing accused communists to invoke the fifth amendment while refusing to identify their comrades.”
Hoover and the FBI called the plan and operation, COINTELPRO, which was short for “counterintelligence program.”
This program was not necessarily counterintelligence though; it was targeting people in America through secret data collected through illegal means.
According to ENEMIES: “The first operation began on August 28, 1956. Armed with the intelligence gathered through break-ins, bugs, and taps, COINTELPRO began to attack hundreds, then thousands, of suspected Communists and socialists with anonymous hate mail tax audits by the Internal Revenue Service, and forged documents designed to sow and fertilize seeds of distrust among left-wing factions.”
The goal was to inject hate, fear, paranoia, and destruction within the American Left political spectrum of ideologies.
Soon there would be “twelve major COINTELPRO campaigns, aimed at targets across the political spectrum, and a total of 2,340 separate operations.”
Years later, in 1975, Sullivan spoke in a closed Senate chamber, at the end of his career, detailing what drove the men’s minds during this time.
“This is a rough, tough, dirty business, and dangerous. It was dangerous at times. No holds were barred. Never once did I hear anybody, including myself, raise the question: ‘Is this course of action which we have agreed upon lawful? Is it legal? Is it ethical or moral? We never gave any thought to this realm of reasoning.”
On October 2, 1956, Hoover increased the Bureau’s surveillance of black civil rights activists. He sent a COINTELPRO memo to the Bureau, warning that “the Communist Party was seeking to infiltrate the movement.”
Hoover started watching the new leaders of the civil rights movement very closely. By 1957, COINTELPRO was primed as a weapon in the long struggle between black Americans and their government.
As the Klan began dynamiting black churches, burning synagogues, shooting people in the back with hunting rifles, and infiltrating state and local law enforcement during the era of desegregation, Hoover took a hands-off stance toward the KKK.
Hoover would not direct the FBI to investigate or penetrate the Klan unless the president ordered it to be done.
FBI agent Fletcher D. Thompson explained it at the time by saying that “Headquarters came out with instructions that we were not to develop any high-level Klan informants because it might appear that we were guiding and directing the operations of the Klan.”
Tim Weiner astutely pointed out in ENEMIES how this was obviously just a rationalization for racism and inaction.
“[Hoover] was very consistent throughout the years. The things he hated, he hated all his life. He hated liberalism, he hated blacks, he hated Jews–he had this great long list of hates.”
Bill Sullivan speaking about Hoover
Hoover’s paranoia for Black civil rights leaders and communism came to a boiling point in early 1957, when a man named Martin Luther King, Jr. began growing in popularity from his speeches and ideas.
Hoover convinced the Kennedys–and anyone who would listen–that Martin Luther King, Jr., was “part of Moscow’s grand design to subvert the United States of America.”
Hoover had identified King’s speechwriter, Stanley Levison, “as a secret member of the Communist Party.”
Levison had “evidently cut his ties to the Party, when he had begun to work for King” but Hoover remained in the belief that Levison was being led by Moscow, “whispering in King’s ear, indoctrinating him in Marxist thought and subversive strategies.”
On March 16, 1962, the wiretaps began recording across Levison’s different phone lines. For Hoover, it was invaluable as Levison was King’s closest advisor.
It didn’t take long for Hoover to order the FBI in Atlanta and New York to open a case called “COMMUNIST INFILTRATION OF THE SOUTHERN CHRISTIAN LEADERSHIP CONFERENCE.”
According to ENEMIES: “the FBI relentlessly recorded Martin Luther King planning the August 1963 March on Washington, which brought 250,000 demonstrators to the capital in the largest public protest in American history.”
It was at this time that many within the government began warning “King against his associations with Communists” [including] the president of the United States.”
Hoover continued hitting the White House with memos framing King at the center of a Communist conspiracy against the country. He continued constructing damning FBI reports “on the deep history of the Communist Party’s connections with the civil rights movement.”
Hoover’s goal was “a document so convincing that it would destroy Martin Luther King.”
After MLK’s legendary “I Have a Dream” speech, Sullivan drafted a memo to Hoover: “In the light of King’s powerful demagogic speech … we must mark him now, if we have not done so before, as the most dangerous Negro of the future in this Nation from the standpoint of Communism, the Negro, and national security.”
The document painted King as a communist sympathizer, and highlighted the contacts who were supposedly communist as well, circulating all around Washington, D.C.
According to ENEMIES, “Robert Kenedy ordered it withdrawn, but too late. [The memo] shocked senators and generals [and] gave Hoover the leverage he needed for an all-encompassing surveillance of King and the Civil Rights movement.”
In October, Robert F. Kennedy approved “Hoover’s requests for an unlimited electronic surveillance of King and the SCLC headquarters in Atlanta.”
The bugs brought in information quickly as they were placed in all of King’s hotel rooms as he traveled across the country to speak and preach.
According to the FBI, the wiretaps mostly reflect King “thinking out loud, planning the civil rights movement, [as well as] weighing tactics and strategies.”
The FBI also claimed to have picked up the sounds of King having sex, more specifically committing infidelity against his wife, which filled Hoover with uncontained rage.
“The FBI realizes that the relationship continues ’cause they’re wiretapping. They can see this all playing out. This of course enraged the FBI. Hoover was very upset about this, because he saw it as evidence that just as he suspected all along, King was lying, he was deceiving, that there was in fact a plot, that these ties were very close. It really only reinforced his sense that something bigger was going on. ”
Beverly Gage, author and historian
“One day I come home and my wife says, ‘I didn’t know you had arranged for the telephone company to come and put in new wiring for our phones.’ I said ‘What are you talking about?’ She said, ‘I don’t know, they just put a whole new thing into one of our closets.’ I thought about it maybe several hours and l said… I said, ‘Ann, did they call you.’ ‘Yeah, they called me up. They said they had talked to you.’ And shortly after that, I began to think, okay, my phone is tapped.”
Clarence Jones, Chief Strategist to MLK
On November 18, 1964, Hoover pulled a group of reporters into his office to proclaim that King was “the most notorious liar in the country.” This was in response to the news breaking that MLK was set to receive a Nobel Peace Prize.
Bill Sullivan ran a special COINTELPRO on MLK, which consisted of “a package of the King sex tapes prepared by the FBI’s lab technicians.” The package and an attached letter were sent to King’s home in Atlanta.
One paragraph in the letter reads: “No person can overcome the facts, no even a fraud like yourself. Lend your sexually psychotic ear to the enclosure. You will find yourself and in all your dirt, filth, evil and moronic talk exposed on the record for all time. . . . Listen to yourself, you filthy, abnormal animal. You are on the record.”
The letter ended with an ominous threat, implying King would need to end his life in 34 days: “King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is. You have just 34 days in which to do it (this exact number has been selected for a specific reason, it has definite practical significance). You are done. There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation.”
The president grew tired of the growing resistance on the American Left, and so Hoover continued digging down into the antiwar and Black liberation movements, “with infiltrators and informants.”
The Bureau created a national program called ‘VIDEM,’ for Vietnam demonstrations. It fed the president “a steady stream of intelligence on the leaders of the movement” as well as many of the identities of those protesting the war.
The paranoia and spying turned into urban warfare from the FBI and police in response to protests and community organizing in 1967. The National Guard was deployed against Black Americans across dozens of riots, “sometimes with live ammunition and orders to shoot to kill.”
In total, there were eighty-eight deaths, 1,397 injuries, and 16,389 arrests.
Hoover and the president continued to grow in their paranoia and fear over their projected Moscow connection between Martin Luther King and Stanley Levison’s movement.
At the president’s bidding, Hoover launched COINTELPRO–BLACK HATE on August 25, 1967.
Hoover publicly declared King, and some of his most ardent supporters, as the leading “rabble-rousers inciting black riots.”
COINTELPRO–BLACK HATE was put side by side the “Ghetto Informant Program,” which enlisted thousands of people”–many of them respectable businessmen, military veterans, and senior citizens–to keep watch over the black communities of urban America.”
The programs both doubled in size and scope quickly.
Later that year, as antiwar protestors continued to anger LBJ, the president ordered the FBI, CIA, and army “to root out the conspiracy to overthrow his government.”
“I’m not going to let the Communists take this government and they’re doing it right now!”
LBJ shouted during a ninety-five-minute Saturday morning meeting between the heads of the Department of State, Department of Defense, and the CIA, November 4, 1967.
Following the president’s orders, the FBI began to spy on and monitor Americans in harmony with the NSA and the United States Army.
There were reportedly about 100,000 Americans under close surveillance at this time, with all the government agencies sharing files and notes.
As Tim Weiner explains in ENEMIES: “The president had created a concerted effort to organize a secret police. He was trying to synchronize the gears of the FBI, the CIA, and the army to create an all pervasive intelligence machine that would watch citizens as if they were foreign spies.”
Hoover feared a surge of left-wing politics coming for the government when Lyndon Johnson renounced his power on March 31, 1968.
RFK’s campaign was generating excitement among black voters across the country, which inspired Hoover to ramp up his own efforts
On April 4, 1968, Hoover instructed his agents to be prepared for what he called “Black Hate,” writing that “the Negro youth and moderates must be made to understand that if they succumb to revolutionary teaching, they will be dead revolutionaries.”
The next night brought the news of MLK being assassinated.
Left wing protests and movements continued to surge across colleges, adding to Hoover’s paranoia. He was optimistic about Republican politics bringing about more security for the country, and more support for the FBI to carry out its goals.
When Nixon came into office, LBJ had instructed him to “depend on Hoover, and Hoover alone, to keep his secrets and protect his power.”
Nixon’s mind was warped from paranoia, which was only made worse from the political assassinations and marches happening around him. Nixon “ordered Hoover back into the field of political warfare” and also brought back wiretaps and burglary as a means of collecting intel.
The early days of Nixon’s presidency were tumultuous. There were several situations that raised alarm within the government, but nothing sounded louder than the Black Panther Party.
Hoover called the Black Panther Party and its leaders “the greatest threat to the internal security of the United States.”
The Party was starting to fragment, in part from Sullivan using COINTELPRO initiatives to place “informers at high levels inside the party” and so the men only needed to continue what they were doing.
The Black Panthers were protesting and calling attention to what was happening–and what had been happening– to the Black community, in America, and around the world–and it was working.
One of the earliest things the Black Panthers did that greatly disturbed law enforcement and the FBI, was to monitor police patrols, in Panther patrols, while armed. No laws were being broken, but it still rattled Hoover and anyone else who didn’t want to see the power structure of the country shift.
“I think the Black Panthers really understood the media.They knew what we were after, they knew what we were focusing on. Many people know that we exploited the Black Panthers but I think there is a lot of evidence that they used us to their advantage.They were able to establish their legitimacy as a voice of protest.”
Jim Dunbar, Journalist
“You’re talking about people who were teenagers–seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty–that’s the bulk of the panthers, are teenagers. So the fact that we are so young, and the fact that this hadn’t happened before, I’m not certain that we recognized how startling it looked to other people.”
Kathleen Cleaver
The Black Panthers served “about 20,000 meals a week in nineteen different communities” to any child who was hungry.
“Studies came up saying that children that didn’t have a good breakfast in the morning were less attentive at school and less inclined to do well. I mean, there was all sorts of scientific reasons to have a good breakfast in the morning. And we just simply took that information and a program was developed to serve breakfast to children.”
David Lemieux, Black Panther Party
This proved to be effective not only for the party goals of helping their community, but also for spreading the true message of the Black Panther Party. This resulted in Hoover attacking the Panthers with greater intensity and frequency.
As the Panthers opened up free food and healthcare programs, J. Edgar Hoover begins to attack the Panthers more directly.
“Hoover saw any form of Black organizing as a threat to the status quo as he saw it. Change that would have involved equality, that would have put power in Black people’s hands was very much a threat to Hoover. He started something called COINTELPRO directed against what he called Black Nationalist Hate Groups.”
Jeff Haas, Attorney
“The purpose of this new counterintelligence endeavor is to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of Black Nationalists.”
J. Edgar Hoover in the memo launching COINTELPRO
“Neutralize could mean making somebody an informant, or putting somebody in jail, or having somebody killed.”
M. Wesley Swearingen, FBI Agent
“245 of the 290 COINTELPRO actions were against the Black Panthers. One of the mandates was to not make this program public. ‘Do not tell anyone that it exists.'”
Jeff Haas, Attorney
“Hoover was sending letters to various offices, almost on a weekly basis, to come up with new ideas to go after members of the Black Panther Party.”
M. Wesley Swearingen, FBI Agent
“FBI has a memo that states the objectives of counterintelligence operations. One is to prevent the rise of what they called ‘a black messiah,’ a single charismatic leader that could unify the movement. They wanted to prevent the appeal of radical political movement to black youth. And they wanted to isolate these groups to prevent them from gaining respectability in the black community. And they were very explicit in stating these goals.”
Scott Brown, historian
“We were followed everyday. We were harassed. Our phones were tapped. Our families were harassed. My parents were visited by the FBI.”
Ericka Huggins, Black Panther Party
“We must create suspicion with respect to their respective spouses and your imagination and resourcefulness must be employed in order for the Bureau to be successful”
Hoover, COINTELPRO memo
“They would send letters to my wife, and the letters would say Landon was sleeping with this woman, or that woman, or sleeping with the other woman. Then when I got arrested the FBI came to me and said ‘Ha, look, we got all this evidence on you. All these people are gonna flip and turn on you. We’re gonna execute you cause we got you now. But if you will be an informant for us, then we’ll let you go.”
Landon Williams, Black Panther Party
The correlation of forces was changing in America. Nixon would remake the Supreme Court by appointing right wing justices, ironically promising to restore “respect for the law” while giving the law little thought while working with the FBI against groups of people they were labeling as criminal.
The Hutson Plan emerged from meetings between the president and the FBI, calling for “America’s intelligence services to work as one.”
This framework would give FBI agents free reign to act as they had been for decades, but with the president’s blessing, instead of tip-toeing quietly behind the scenes.
Nixon did not believe a president could break the law, and Nixon and Hoover had shared goals of destroying an assortment of opposition groups.
Hoover, Nixon, and the government as a whole firmly acted in doing what was necessary to take down the Panthers, Communists, and all other groups that were considered to be subversive.
“My recruitment by the FBI was very efficient, very simple really. I’d stolen a car, went joyriding over the state limit, and they had a potential case against me. And I was looking for an opportunity to work it off. And a couple months later, that opportunity came when an FBI agent Roy Mitchell asked me to go down to the local office of the Black Panther Party and try to gain membership.
William O’Neal, FBI Informant
The FBI wanted to destroy the Panthers. They absolutely saw the Panthers as the Vanguard of a very, very threatening and violent revolutionary movement. They absolutely wanted this organization to be destroyed.”
Beverly Gage, author and historian
Many panthers took up residence together, in what were known as ‘Panther Pads,’ with 10 or more members sharing an apartment.
The Black Panthers didn’t have the same windfall of funding that the FBI and Congress had, and so all of the Party’s growth and goals were paid for by the The Black Panther paper. The paper helped get the ideas of the Panthers out into places where party members couldn’t always reach, and only cost twelve and a half cents to print. The other twelve and a half cents went to funding the chapters of the Party.
Law enforcement, as well as the federal government, grew even more bothered as white college youth began repeating the phrases and teachings of the Black Panther Party.
The police and FBI took action as if the Black Panther Party was a terrorist organization, because it was how they viewed the organization trying to incite social change. Raids were conducted but these were far different than many of the previous raids conducted by law enforcement and the FBI. Against the Panthers, law enforcement would just break into the buildings and start shooting, giving Panthers no option to even surrender sometimes.
In the instances when arrests happened instead of death, the Panthers would often face a myriad of manufactured charges and excessive bail amounts.
Trials and charges for other Panthers continued across the country though, many of them with less attention and support. This resulted in the party continuing to decline and capitulate under the terror of the FBI.
The violence at the hands of the FBI and police came to a boiling point when Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton was identified as a dangerous voice and Black nationalist by the FBI.
Hampton was a natural leader for the Panther party–and a natural target for the FBI. He was able to command any room of people he spoke in, and he spoke of systemic inequality and what needed to be done to change it. Hampton was building a broad base of all different communities of support, for a unified coalition with shared goals. Fred Hampton was bringing church people, street people, Black people, White people, Latinos, and Puerto Ricans together.
Hoover feared the organization and charisma of Hampton, and how he believed he would unite white and black people together against the issues of the panthers. For Hoover, Hampton represented the catalyst of all his fears: a Black messiah.
By June 1969, William O’Neale, at this point the personal bodyguard of Fred Hampton, had supplied the FBI with keys and a detailed floor plan to the Black Panther Headquarters.
” … You have to understand that people have to pay the price for peace. If you dare to struggle, you dare to win. If you dare not struggle then goddamnit you don’t deserve to win.
Let me say peace to you if you’re willing to fight for it. Let me say in the spirit of liberation—I’ve been gone for a little while, at least my body’s been gone for a little while. But I’m back now and I believe that I’m back to stay.
I believe that I’m going to do my job and I believe that I was born not to die in a car wreck; I don’t believe that I’m going to die in a car wreck.
I don’t believe I’m going to die slipping on a piece of ice; I don’t believe I’m going to die because I got a bad heart; I don’t believe I’m going to die because of lung cancer.
I believe that I’m going to be able to die doing the things I was born for. I believe that I’m going to be able to die high off the people. I believe that I will be able to die as a revolutionary in the international revolutionary proletarian struggle. And I hope that each one of you will be able to die in the international proletarian revolutionary struggle or you’ll be able to live in it. And I think that struggle’s going to come.
Why don’t you live for the people?
Why don’t you struggle for the people?
Why don’t you die for the people? “
– Fred Hampton, ‘If you Dare to Struggle, You Dare to Win’
December 3, 1969, hours before his death
Hampton falls asleep around midnight at the Black Panther Party Headquarters. He was fast asleep, having been unknowingly drugged by William O’Neale under orders from the FBI.
The State’s Attorney had already prepared an exact layout of the Black Panther Headquarters/apartment, for police to work out their story and practice before the planned raid.
In the apartment, there were no warnings to the Panthers. The police knocked and started shooting as soon as the door was opened. A flurry of bullets were immediately fired through the door from submachine guns, all into a room not more than 6 feet wide.
Hampton was fast asleep from the drugs administered to him from O’Neale. The 21 year old wasn’t even conscious during his own death.
The cops finally entered, confirming Hampton was indeed dead.
Blood filled the apartment, much of it pouring from Hampton’s body. The police didn’t bother to close the crime scene, or secure it in any way; this gave the Black Panthers the ability to bring in people from outside, in order for there to be witnesses to the politically and racially motivated violence that had just taken place.
Like all the other violence from the FBI and police against the Black community, it was all unnecessary. There was never actually a need for it. As Chicago law enforcement quickly pointed out on the news at the time, the FBI and law enforcement could have used tear gas to clear out the apartment, and arrested everyone inside.
But it was never about arrests, or jail sentences. It was always about violence, fear, and lawlessness being used to terrorize the Black community, and other groups of people who only ever asked for freedom.
History and the FBI’s own memos have consistently shown the FBI and law enforcement would often prefer gunning down Black teenagers instead of listening to their request for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, inside a land that claims to have been built upon such principles.
Police refused to budge from the “official” account that was provided to the public and reporters. Internally however, the FBI gave William O’Neale a $300 bonus for his help in the assassination of Fred Hampton, all the while, publicly denying any involvement.
Under the cover of night, on March 8, 1971, a group of civilian spies did a little black-bag-job of their own … into the Bureau’s office in Media, Pennsylvania.
It was easier than anyone in the group likely anticipated; the FBI had no security system. All the group had to do was “jimmy” a lock and walk through doors. “At least 800 hundred documents” were stolen from the FBI’s files.
Hoover and the FBI were frantic the next morning, assuring the president that arrests were imminent, but none ever came. No one was ever charged and the case remains officially unsolved.
The group called itself the Citizens’ Commission, and immediately started copying and spreading the files to congress and reporters.
This was when the public began to learn exactly how obsessed the FBI was with spying on people with which there was no reason to.
The files contained “undercover FBI operations to infiltrate twenty-two college campuses with informers,” details on wiretapping the Black Panthers, and even mentions of ‘COINTELPRO,’ though at this point, no one knew what the word even meant.
As reporters worked to uncover the meaning of ‘COINTELPRO,’ Hoover paused the secret directive entirely, in a last-ditch effort “to keep the deepest secrets of the FBI from being exposed.”
According to Tim Weiner’s ENEMIES: “Hundreds of operations, almost all of them aimed at the Left, were killed.”
Nixon would restore their purpose a few weeks later.
Hoover would suddenly pass away on May 2, 1972, with Nixon reportedly remarking, “Oh, he died at the right time, didn’t he? Goddamn, it’d have killed him to lose that office. It would have killed him.”
As the Nixon White House began to crack and collapse, so too did some of the walls within the foundation of the FBI.
The FBI fought in federal court to prevent the release of the bureau’s COINTELPRO files to the public–but it was too late. The first legal disclosure of the Bureau’s records under the Freedom of Information Act came on December 7, 1973.
Many FBI agents worked hard “to conceal crucial chapters of the Bureau’s history from the Justice Department and Congress.”
One agent even set fire to “thousands of pages of files to prevent the secrets from leaking.”
Agents at the FBI offices in New York and Washington, D.C. made “extraordinary efforts” to conceal “five major undisclosed COINTELPRO programs from the director and the attorney general.”
The fallout from the Nixon White House and the Watergate scandal had helped clear the way for a modicum of accountability in Washington.
The first public hearings on the FBI and its actions took place in the Senate on November 18, 1975.
The hearings really got into the mud of the FBI’s history, including “the bugging of MLK, the maintenance of a half-million pages of internal security files on Americans, the abuses of civil liberties in the COINTELPRO campaigns, and the misuse of investigative power as a weapon of political warfare.”
The hearings ended with the Senate concluding the FBI had spied on Americans “without just cause,” with the committee laying the responsibility for the Bureau’s unlawful actions at the feet of “the long line of Attorneys General, Presidents, and Congresses who handed power to the FBI, without “adequate guidance, direction, and control.”
Public approval of the FBI sank lower than it had ever been.
The government, the country, and the world finally started to see the FBI clearly, now that the history of the organization’s intentions was on display, for all the world to see, when the bureau was sure that no one was watching.
“So many resources are mobilized against suppressing dissent in the U.S. The FBI has done extensive surveillance of all kinds of Black organizations. The Bureau was of course anti-communist but I’d say its most consistent campaigns were against Black people. Whether it’s William Sullivan, or J. Edgar Hoover, the policy was consistent.”
Donna Murch
“What you see is the government taking upon itself the supervision of what is allowed politically, and what is not allowed politically. And when those decisions are made by essentially an organization that’s a political police force such as the FBI, or intelligence agencies like the CIA, or the Department of Defense and Intelligence. When those people are making decisions of what is politically appropriate for the citizens to do then we don’t have a democracy. Then we have essentially a police state because the police are deciding what can happen. And so that’s the fundamental crime of the COINTELPRO programs.
“So they’re using mind games, manipulation, deceit to create confusion, dissension, and end up destroying the leadership. I was in the middle of that and I would say that the repercussions of that kind of COINTELPRO operation are still present.”
Kathleen Cleaver
Many of the tactics, strategies, and directives that existed in the murky and shadowy territory of COINTELPRO are still being done today, and inside of the law.
The Patriot Act, as well as the “War on Terror,” all continued to shift the country’s attitudes on surveillance, while the laws, and what was considered necessary for safety, were adjusted to fit within the objectives of those in power. Just like during World War I, World War II, the Cold War, and the Vietnam War.
Many of the activists who were imprisoned under COINTELPRO remain in prison to this day.
Black people, trans people, gay people, and other marginalized groups of people historically targeted by the United States Government, are still under attack from the government today.
Names and department heads may change but history will tragically continue to repeat itself until there is awareness, accountability, and deliberate change, in how our country responds to people asking for the life, liberty, and freedom that America claims is available to all of us.
From executive orders and initiatives labeling anyone who supports “pro-trans ideology” as a terrorist to the Anti-DEI initiatives from Donald Trump, both aimed at reinforcing White Supremacy and the status quo inside the government.
History endlessly repeats itself unless we interrogate our actions to paint a different picture of our shared and collective future.